Evaluation
Clearcut offers a robust evaluation strategy for projects and organisations seeking to evidence the impact of their work.
Specialising in empathetic, empowering evaluation methodologies for qualitative data collection.
We are here at every stage
We can:
Create evaluation frameworks
Create data collection tools
Analyse data & write evaluation reports.
Evidence how you assess & enhance your quality
Communicate your performance results clearly
Current and recent evaluation commissions
Open Dialogo
Clearcut was invited to evaluate Year 2 of Open Dialogo. Following a well received final report, we were asked back for Year 3, this time adding a longitudinal evaluation to measure impact across all three years of the project for artists and host organisations.
Open Dialogo is an international cultural exchange programme connecting D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent dance artists between England and Italy. Managed by Stopgap Dance Company and backed by Arts Council England, the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Italian Cultural Institute of London and the British Council, it fosters inclusive creativity, artistic research and professional development.
Our approach centres the artist experience. We design inclusive evaluation practices using interview techniques focused on reflection, drawing out individual experience to identify wider impact across the programme. We involve both hosts and artists in seeing what was learnt, strengthening cultural exchange and shared learning as the project unfolds.
We worked with the Project Board to clarify and agree the aims of the evaluation, presenting updates at steering meetings. We provide a compassionate and clear-eyed approach so that sensitive or challenging issues can be noted, shared and learning explored with real-time changes made to benefit future cohorts.
The final report in year 3 will include learning synthesised into a guide for other hosts to welcome disabled artists into inclusive environments to enjoy creative freedom and the conditions to make their best work.
More info on Open Dialogo and see the range of resources available
Future Leaders
We're working alongside the Stopgap staff team and the individual artists on the Future Leaders Programme to evaluate its impact, for the people taking part and for the sector they're helping to shape.
Future Leaders is a career-shaping leadership development opportunity for Deaf, Disabled and neurodivergent mid-career arts professionals.
Our approach uses empathetic interview techniques to draw out verbatim, first-hand experience from artists and staff. We analyse and map these accounts to surface real themes: not just what's working, but where the programme has room to grow. Crucially, we do this while the programme is still running, not only at the end. Evaluating in real time means insight can feed back into the project while there's still a window to act on it, rather than surfacing findings once the opportunity for change has already passed.
Why Stopgap created Future Leaders
Disabled people remain severely underrepresented in arts leadership, with less than 2% of National Portfolio investment reaching disabled-led organisations. Future Leaders exists to close that gap.
Clearcut works with organisations doing vital work for diversity in the arts. Our role isn't to produce advocacy material, it's to give them the real understanding they need to do that work well, and to keep improving as they go.
Ways we've aided include...
We stepped in as evaluators to the final year of Made by Katie Green’s Imagination Museum Strategic Touring Project.
Reviewing data collection, and providing evaluation and impact reports evidencing the benefits and challenges of working in the heritage sector, paving the way for a national support network.
New Queers on the Block (Marlborough Productions) drawing on our allyship for the LGBTQIA+ community to evaluate both iterations of this groundbreaking artist support programme making humane and radical change in queer and intersectional art practice (2019 and 2023).
We have built an evaluation framework for Dance Mama ’s valuable Live programme supporting aspiring, pregnant, on maternity and returning to work parents back into dance and provided evaluation for 2022 and 2023 seasons.
